Prompts

Sunglasses on the nose, or on the head

Sunglasses on the nose, or on the head

Airport fence, a plane on approach, and a very low camera. Two runs, and the thing that changed is smaller than you would expect.

The same scene run again, with the sunglasses pushed up onto her head instead of resting on her nose
Second run. Look at the sunglasses.

Holds across runs: the whole set-up. Chain-link fence running away in perspective, rough concrete wall she is leaning on, an airliner low overhead against a cloudless blue sky, hard midday sun. The wardrobe too — white tie-front blouse with the bow at the waist, pale pink ripped low-rise denim shorts, long wavy ash-brown hair, pearly nails. Back to the camera, head turned over the shoulder, camera almost on the ground. Two for two on everything the prompt spends words on.

Varies: the sunglasses, and that is the whole difference. The prompt is unusually specific — sunglasses that have slipped down to the tip of her nose. One run does exactly that. The other pushes them up onto her head, which is the single most common way sunglasses appear in photographs and therefore the pull the prompt was written to resist. It lost. Which side of the frame the fence runs also flips.

Why that one detail is worth an entry. The specific, unusual instruction is the fragile one, and it is fragile precisely because it is unusual — it is competing against every ordinary version of the same object. Everything ordinary in this prompt survived both runs without effort. If a prompt has one detail you actually care about and it is not the obvious version of that thing, expect to run it more than once.

Nguyen

I write two things here: notes from a homelab that mostly runs Proxmox, and essays in Vietnamese about a country I left. The technical posts are whatever broke that week, written down so it costs you less time than it cost me.

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